Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia PC Performance Review

In-battle – performance and settings comparison  

In Total War’s Battle mode the move from Low to Medium settings provides players with a night and day graphical difference, with major differences to terrain detail the addition of shadows and an increase in unit size offer a significant boost to the game’s visuals. 

We would not recommend playing Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia at anything lower than Medium settings, as the game looks awful at low, serving only to make the game playable on ultra-low-end systems. 

(Low VS Medium)

       

Moving to high settings we can immediately see another boost to unit sizes, promising larger clashes of units as well as greater levels of environmental detail. 

Below we can see that the settlement walls are now much more detailed, especially on the partially destroyed left tower. In the countryside outside of the walls, we can also see walls emerge at the edge of fields and more geometric detail for environmental features, making the area look more grounded in reality. 

Beyond the walls, we can see that smoke now billows from the chimneys of each property and that shadows are now cast around some of the nearby houses, again making the grounding the settlement further into reality with a more “lived-in” feel. 

(Medium VS High)

  

 
Moving up to Ultra settings we can see no change in unit sizes, though we can see another increase in building detail, shadow casts further into the distance and sharper terrain details thanks to the addition of 2x anisotropic filtering. 

In the distance, we can see more smoke billowing from chimneys and houses which have caught fire during this siege battle. Ambient Occlusion also adds extra shading around each unit and around much of the environment, making the distant shields of the soldiers appear much less bright and distracting.   

(High VS Ultra)

  

At Extreme Settings the most visible difference to the game is the maximisation of unit sizes, creating the largest real-time battles that Total War is capable of. 

Aside from this, we see a minimal decrease in performance with our GTX 1080 in this demanding scenario, thanks mostly to the game’s CPU limitations. At least at this preset, the game’s 4x MSAA can make full utilisation of our GTX 1080, which is something that hasn’t been seen in this scene before now. 

(Ultra VS Extreme)